NEWS ANALYSIS : Perry’s Steady Hand Stands Out on Foreign Policy Team : Pentagon: Once dismissed as a technocrat, the defense secretary now commands respect for his quiet effectiveness.

WASHINGTON —  President Clinton’s foreign policy difficulties may be igniting wide criticism of his national security team, but at least one top official is escaping most of the heat: Defense Secretary William J. Perry.

In the past four months, the soft-spoken former mathematics professor has emerged as one of the Administration’s few pleasant surprises in the foreign policy arena. Besides getting a grip on the Pentagon’s sprawling bureaucracy--and gaining the respect of the military--Perry, 66, has become a quiet but important player in the Administration’s foreign policy apparatus, gradually winning plaudits from the Administration and its critics alike.

It was Perry, for example, who helped hone the Administration’s proposal to launch air strikes in Bosnia--limiting the enforcement to a small exclusion zone that NATO forces could handle easily. He was the Administration’s point man in engineering a nuclear weapons disarmament treaty between Russia and Ukraine. More recently, he has become its chief spokesman in the stalemate with North Korea over nuclear weapons inspections.

With few glitches along the way, Perry “is dealing with the problems he’s got as well as anyone can be expected to,” said Robert W. Gaskin, a former Pentagon military strategist who has been a frequent critic of the Administration.

Sharing that opinion is Harold Brown, who served as defense secretary during the Jimmy Carter Administration. “Is he going to solve all of their problems? I think the answer is no,” Brown said. “But he has done very well.”

Admittedly, at least part of Perry’s overnight rise may have come by default. By some outside assessments, Secretary of State Warren Christopher has proved a capable negotiator but not a strategic thinker, and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake has been so low-key that he has failed to enunciate the Administration’s policies clearly. Perry is known as a problem-solver, and he explains issues articulately and directly.

He has also benefited from the inevitable comparisons to his predecessor, Les Aspin.

Aspin’s plans to inject the Pentagon into formulating broad foreign policy brought him into conflict with the State Department and the National Security Council. His frequent public ruminating about policy options, and his accompanying gaffes, heightened the perception that the Administration was in disarray. And his manipulative style alienated many in Congress and the military.

By contrast, Perry is demonstrating himself to be a no-nonsense pragmatist who is quick to make decisions and has an impressive command of detail. Invariably straightforward, he has restored good relations with military leaders and lawmakers.

“He has the complete confidence of the military--he’s frank,” said Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense. “I think he’s doing a commendable job.”

Others say he has quietly brought order out of the previous managerial chaos. “Perry is nothing that Aspin was, and everything that Aspin wasn’t,” one Pentagon-watcher said.

He also has confined himself to the defense secretary’s traditional role of running the nation’s military Establishment and finding ways to make it serve the President’s foreign policy objectives.

Sometimes that means squelching a proposal that seems unrealistically ambitious. For instance, Administration officials say he recently nipped a campaign to mount an invasion of Haiti by publicly questioning what the United States would do once its troops took over the island nation.

Perry is less active in debates on foreign policy issues where the military isn’t likely to play a major role, the officials say.

Often, insiders say, if Perry sees problems with a particular Administration proposal, he counters with an alternative crafted to meet the same goal, as was true with the Bosnia exclusion zone.

The secretary has used his influence in other ways as well. Acting on a conviction that the public must be prepared for a possible outbreak of hostilities by North Korea, Perry took it on himself to warn about the risks that a possible military confrontation would bring. Washington and Pyongyang both got the message.

To be sure, Perry’s four months as secretary have not been entirely error-free. In an appearance on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press” program in early April, he set off a major brouhaha by inadvertently leaving the impression that the United States would sit by and let the Bosnian Serbs storm the Muslim city of Gorazde.

While Perry was technically correct in his explanation of the Administration’s policy, he said he did not anticipate how it sounded or would be interpreted.

And a few weeks ago, he provoked a similar flurry over Haiti when he suggested there were preliminary indications that its military strongman, Gen. Raoul Cedras, was about to resign.

The political and diplomatic ripples from that incident caused some consternation in the State Department, but so far Perry seems to have recovered successfully, vowing to become more careful in his statements to the press.

Asked in a recent interview about his comments on NBC, Perry said: “I have to take a certain part of the responsibility, first of all for not understanding that (the) statement standing by itself could be misinterpreted, and (for) not catching it quickly enough.

“The lessons I’ve drawn from that,” he said wryly, “is when I make a direct, flat statement of that sort, to put the qualifiers in the same statement, not in the next paragraph.”

Perry is anything but shy about reshuffling things. Within days after taking the helm at the Pentagon, Perry jettisoned three of Aspin’s most contentious appointees and dismantled his predecessor’s controversial in-house think tank.

Even now, he has little time for small talk. Pentagon aides say Perry-led meetings typically are over in 30 minutes. The really big sessions last no more than an hour, and decisions almost invariably come soon after.

There also is a certain aloofness about Perry that unsettles some who remember Aspin’s more informal style. There is little evidence of a Perry sense of humor, and he can be so poker-faced in discussions that some insiders find him almost inscrutable.

With a long career in the defense industry--he is known as the godfather of the Stealth bomber--and a background in U.S.-Soviet strategy, high-tech weapons and defense-industry problems, Perry said he has already set a firm agenda: to keep the world from drifting back into a Cold War, to develop a new approach for using U.S. military power in the post-Cold War world and to manage the reduction in the size of the nation’s armed forces.

“I will measure myself” by these goals “when I leave the job,” he said.

Critics concede he has made a good start on the first of these, forging and cementing ties with former Soviet Bloc military leaders, helping achieve an accord with Russia and Ukraine to dismantle their nuclear weapons, and pressing the Administration’s new Partnership for Peace program in NATO.

He has begun work on his second objective by creating half a dozen new task forces within the Pentagon to study proposals for altering the way the United States uses military power.

On the third, he has begun efforts to streamline the way the Pentagon buys equipment and weapons systems. He has also sought to ease the impact of military downsizing on the nation’s defense industries base by eliminating excess regulations and preserving some programs in order to keep production lines open.

Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Defense Budget Project, a nonpartisan research firm in Washington, predicts that Perry’s most serious test may come when the rapidly shrinking defense budget begins to force the Administration into making some major choices about what kind of military it really wants.

“If present trends hold, the seams are going to come apart,” Krepinevich said. “We’ll see what Perry is made of then.”

For all of Perry’s long ties with the defense Establishment, aides say he is thoroughly comfortable with Clinton’s current foreign policies. Although frustrated at times because he cannot move things along more rapidly, he agrees with Clinton on most major issues. A liberal on social issues, he also backs Clinton’s decisions to crack down on sexual harassment and discrimination against gays in the military--although he has kept a low profile on both issues.

Perry’s success is somewhat surprising given that he was hardly Clinton’s favorite for the job. Dismissed earlier as a technocrat, he initially was passed up for Aspin, who was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

After Aspin resigned in December of last year, Clinton picked Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, who embarrassingly removed himself from contention after a short time. It was then that Perry’s name came up seriously--as a safe, if unspectacular, choice. Clinton went along, but with little evident enthusiasm.

Today, however, there are few in the Administration who believe that Clinton has settled for a second-rater in the office. If anything, even Perry has been amazed at the pace of it all.

“It’s been a damn exciting (four) months.” he said. “It seems like there’s been a crisis a week ever since I got into the job.”